Alongside the racing, I spent time on ideas for equipment I wanted to use. Some were about performance, like the 3D-printed aero extensions. Others were more everyday, like finding a better way to store a bike.
I knew these problems from using the equipment myself. I wasn’t thinking about a career in design yet. I was interested in what I could make.
With the bike projects, I could start with what bothered me. Flow needed me to understand someone else’s experience.
I learned that smoking was as much about the physical habits and rituals around it as the nicotine itself. Having a cigarette after a meal, for example, was part of a familiar routine.
That meant thinking about how a product could fit into those moments, as well as how it delivered nicotine.
I left Brighton with a first-class degree. Flow helped me get a job at Cambridge Consultants, where I could work on those questions alongside engineers and scientists.
Fever-Tree’s Perfect Serve was about taking the experience of serving from a bottle into a different format. I helped shape and win the £2m project, then led the design through delivery as Design Authority.
I also worked with JUUL Labs and was named as an inventor on multiple patent filings. Both projects meant working closely with specialists whose knowledge was very different from mine.
I was responsible for seeing projects through, but I wanted more time with the same product after launch. I wanted to see how people used it and help decide what to change. That was what appealed to me about moving in-house.
I wanted more time with the things I designed once customers were using them. BOXT gave me that opportunity.
I built the customer research practice and worked across boilers, heat pumps, EV charging and solar. The website was only part of it. What we designed also had to work for installers, operations teams and finance providers.
I worked with the teams building and running the service, following the work from research through to delivery. Once it was live, there was still more to learn and change.
Zuno grew from the technology developed at BOXT. The work now includes making that platform useful to other businesses.
I lead acquisition design across solar, EV charging and energy tariffs. I also lead the user insight practice, help shape the roadmap and support a junior designer.
A lot of the work is telling the customer’s story to colleagues in product, engineering and commercial roles. I want them to understand what someone is trying to do, where they’re struggling and why we’re proposing a particular change. That gives us something concrete to discuss when deciding what to build.
